[ RadSafe ] Another Chernobyl tourist story

[John Jacobus]

This appeared in today's New York Times at
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/15/international/europe/15chernobyl.html?
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June 15, 2005

New Sight in Chernobyl's Dead Zone: Tourists

By C. J. CHIVERS 

PRIPYAT, Ukraine, June 11 - Sometime after visiting
the ruins of the Polissia Hotel, the darkened
Energetic theater and the idled Ferris wheel, the
minivans stopped again. Doors slid open. Six young
Finnish men stepped out and followed their guide
through a patch of temperate jungle that once was an
urban courtyard. 

Branches draped down. Mud squished underfoot. A cloud
of mosquitoes rose to the feast. The men stepped past
discarded gas-mask filters to the entrance of a
ghostly kindergarten. They fanned out with cameras, to
work.

Much was as the children and their teachers had left
it 19 years ago. Tiny shoes littered the classroom
floor. Dolls and wooden blocks remained on shelves.
Soviet slogans exhorted children to study, to
exercise, to prepare for a life of work. 

Much had also changed. Now there is rot, broken
windows, rusting bed frames and paint falling away in
great blisters and peels. And now there are tourists,
participating in what may be the strangest vacation
excursion available in the former Soviet space: the
packaged tour of the Chernobyl exclusion zone, scene
of the worst civilian disaster of the nuclear age.

A 19-mile radius around the infamous power plant, the
zone has largely been closed to the world since
Chernobyl's Reactor No. 4 exploded on April 26, 1986,
sending people to flight and exposing the Communist
Party as an institution wormy with hypocrisy and lies.

For nearly 20 years it has been a dark symbol of
Soviet rule. Its name conjures memories of
incompetence, horror, contamination, escape and
sickness, as well as the party elite's disdain for
Soviet citizens, who were called to parade in fallout
on May Day while the leaders' families secretly fled.

Now it is a destination, luring people in. "It is
amazing," said Ilkka Jahnukainen, 22, as he wandered
the empty city here that housed the plant's workers
and families, roughly 45,000 people in all. "So
dreamlike and silent." 

The word Chernobyl also long ago became a dreary,
shopworn joke, shorthand for contaminated wasteland.
But Chernobylinterinform, the zone's information
agency, says its chaperoned tours do not carry health
risks. 

This is because, the agency says, radiation levels
here have always been uneven. And most of the zone is
far cleaner than it was in 1986, when radiation levels
were strong enough in places to kill even trees. 

A lethal exposure of radiation ranges from 300 to 500
roentgens an hour; levels in the tour areas vary from
15 to several hundred microroentgens an hour. A
microroentgen is one-millionth of a roentgen. Dangers
at these levels, the agency says, lie in long-term
exposure. 

Still, the zone in northern Ukraine has much more
radioactive spots than those where tourists typically
go. So there are rules, which Yuriy Tatarchuk, a
government interpreter who served as the Finns' guide,
listed. 

Don't stray. Stay on concrete and asphalt, where
exposure risks are lower than on soil. Don't touch
anything. (This one proved impossible. Tours involve
climbing cluttered staircases and stepping through
debris. Handholds are inevitable.)

No matter its inconveniences or potential for medical
worry, the zone possesses the allure of the forbidden
and a promise of rare, personal insights into history.
Its popularity as a destination is increasing. Few
tourists came in 2002, the year it opened for such
visits, according to Marina Polyakova, of
Chernobylinterinform. In 2004 about 870 arrived, she
said, a pace tourists are matching this year.

Tourists cannot wander the zone on their own. One-day
group excursions cost $200 to $400, including
transportation and a meal. 

The tour on Saturday began with a drive through
meadows, marshes and forest, belts of green broken by
glimpses of gap-roofed houses and crumbling barns. 

It is what Mary Mycio, a Ukrainian-American lawyer in
Kiev and author of a soon-to-be released book,
"Wormwood Forest: A Natural History of Chernobyl,"
calls a "radioactive wilderness," an accidental
sanctuary populated by wolves, boars and endangered
birds. Its beauty cannot be overstated.

Soon reminders of the grim history appeared. The tour
stopped at a graveyard of vehicles and helicopters
used to fight Chernobyl's fires. 

Roughly 2,000 radioactive machines are parked here -
fire trucks, ambulances, armored vehicles, trucks,
aircraft. Two tourists slipped through the barbed wire
and wandered the junkyard, taking pictures for a Web
site they plan to make of the trip. The rest roamed
the edge, awed. "I cannot find words," said Juha
Vaittinen, 22.

The minivans then headed to Chernobyl proper for a
briefing on the accident. Next stop: the nuclear plant
and "sarcophagus," the concrete-and-steel shell built
to contain Reactor No. 4's radioactive spew. Mr.
Tatarchuk held up a radiation detector - 470
microroentgens per hour.

The Finns posed for a group shot.

Motivations for coming here are many. The Finnish
tourists, all in their 20's, said they had an affinity
for lonely, abandoned places, and the zone so far
exceeded the forgotten homes, farms or industrial
spaces in Finland that its draw became irresistible.
They flew to Kiev from Helsinki solely for the trip.

Mr. Tatarchuk said others had turned up because they
were curious about the disaster, or wished to enter an
accidental preserve of Soviet life. Bird-watchers have
visited to catalogue the zone's resurgent life.

One group came for a hoax. About two years ago, Mr.
Tatarchuk said, a Ukrainian woman booked a tour, wore
a leather biker jacket and posed for pictures. Soon
there appeared a Web site in which the woman, using
the name Elena, claimed that she had been given an
unlimited pass by her father, a nuclear physicist and
Chernobyl researcher ("Thank you, Daddy!" she wrote)
and now roamed the ruins at will on her Kawasaki Big
Ninja.

The site, www.kiddofspeed.com, billed as a tale "where
one can ride with no stoplights, no police, no danger
to hit some cage or some dog," was a sensation, duping
uncountable viewers before being discredited.

The Finns said they had seen the Web site, and hoped
their planned site would be as popular.

On the day of their tour, the most haunting
destination came last: Pripyat, a city left behind.
"Heralded as the world's youngest city when it opened
its doors in the mid-1970's," Ms. Mycio writes,
"Pripyat also turned out to be its shortest lived."

The city was encased on this day in a silence broken
by breezes sighing through rustling trees. A heavier
hush resided in buildings, where drops of water
plopped loudly into puddles, and glass squeaked as it
broke underfoot. Built on marshes, the place smelled
of peat.

At the amusement park, near idled bumper cars, Mr.
Tatarchuk's monitor registered 144 microroentgens an
hour. He moved four feet away, to a mat of damp green
moss. It read 823. "Stay off the moss," he said. 

The moss is all around. Pripyat, both a time capsule
of the Soviet Union and a monument to its folly and
pain, is being consumed. What looters have not sacked
or stolen succumbs now to the elements and time. 

A cafe patio atop the Polissia Hotel, offering views
to the reactor that ruined this place, has been
colonized by birch trees. One stands roughly seven
feet tall, climbing skyward from a crack in the
high-rise's tiles. 

Fine views of Pripyat are available from among these
misplaced trees, including one in the direction of the
reactor that reveals an empty clinic bearing an
enormous sign. "The health of the people," it reads,
"is the wealth of the country." 

Mr. Tatarchuk, looking down over buckling rooftops,
repeated those words in Russian, then allowed himself
a knowing, head-shaking smile.

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

+++++++++++++++++++
"Every now and then a man's mind is stretched by a new idea and never shrinks back to its original proportion." -- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

-- John
John Jacobus, MS
Certified Health Physicist
e-mail:  crispy_bird at yahoo.com

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